My study is strewn with too many once-neat piles of papers and with ring binders whose rings are too slim for the bloated contents they hold within. Still, in paper, my diary, always incomplete, and with inserts wedged in here and there, lies buried. As I attempt to make order, I discover a journal – my grandfather’s – from 1943. I begin to thumb through its yellowed pages. Years are stripped back – my grandfather died 32 years ago – but his hand as familiar as a letter arrived yesterday. This journal, though, is before my time. It is September 1943, a time of war, and New York is apprehensive. My grandfather is studying smoke…

Looking at his familiar hand, my eye scans the desk for his fountain-pen, a gold-nibbed Parker from the 1930s. He gave it to me nearly 60 years ago. I used to write stylish (and copious) letters with it. But I’m lazy now, I send emails. I wonder whether my grandchildren will discover my journals, were they to exist? Or will all be wiped out at the click of a mouse…

In the next pile another page surfaces and 70 years suddenly passed by, my younger then nine-year-old son Cai is composing. And his older brother Isaac painting birds. Are these parts of my journal? These objets d’art are themselves seven years old. They join the space for reflection and critique.

I find some letters next at the bottom of another precariously stacked mountain of unnumbered pages. Letters, like a journal penned in ink, take time. Ink isn’t easily eradicated, no easy delete option, so one considers before one writes… I’ve recently been in the Bodleian reading letters Mendelssohn wrote to his pupil in London, William Sterndale Bennett. They are so concrete – so un-virtual – each fragile letter with Mendelssohn’s elegant and immaculate hand a unique artefact. The to-and-fro of their exchange is elevated by time: each letter, gently pondered, written, blotted, folded and posted is absorbed into spaciousness. Time passes. It arrives some days later and is received and contemplated, replied to and posted again in return. There are no telephones, no electronic anything. There is more territory for thought…

My godson Ben has led me to self-evaluation. That’s the operative process in designing a website. The design is reliant on the content, but the content isn’t intelligible without the structure. The evaluation complete, Ben has then worked magic with his colleagues to create my site. And so I look forward not only to tell the progress of my activities but to write my journal as a place to share thought, for obliterating distance in time and space, a website is a wonderful place to share.